Monthly Archives: September 2016

On September 30, a federal judge threw a new wrench into Wisconsin’s voter ID law, ordering an investigation into whether the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles employees properly implemented measures to ensure availability of identity documents to prospective voters. Those employees seem to caught in the middle, torn between assisting the disproportionately African-American poor in getting “documented” on one hand, and fulfilling Republican politicians’ aims of suppressing black voter turnout on the other. Cue world’s smallest violin.

At one time — as late as the mid-1990s — conservative Republicans claimed to oppose “national ID” schemes and other intrusive government measures. Then they discovered that such schemes could be used to their own political advantage. They’ve been trying to turn the United States in to a variant of the Soviet Union’s old “internal passport” regime ever since, partly in the name of “fighting terrorism” and partly in the name of fighting “voter fraud.”

Both claims are dumb, but the “voter fraud” claim is particularly weird. It wasn’t until the 1980s that all 50 all states even offered photo driver’s licenses, let alone required photo ID to vote. Somehow America managed to elect 40 presidents without everyone showing photos of themselves to bureaucrats on demand. Now for some reason not carrying an unflattering picture of yourself in your wallet is suddenly an existential threat to the Republic. Or at least to the Republicans.

Is voter fraud common? It’s hard say. For one thing, not all vote fraud is voter fraud. There are lots of ways to fake votes. Only some of those ways involve the retail use of false voter credentials. I’m not going to say that kind of thing never takes place, but by its nature it’s a lot more complicated, burdensome and vulnerable to exposure than other methods. Like, for example, stuffing extra ballots in the box after the polls have closed and attributing those votes to to voters who didn’t actually show up.

The only recent case of voter fraud I personally remember is that of one Todd Akin of St. Louis County, Missouri, who got caught lying about his address in 2011 so that he could continue voting at his old polling place instead of admitting he had moved. He wasn’t African-American, though. He was white. And he was a Republican congressman. For some reason the Republicans I’ve talked about voter fraud with haven’t shown much interest in discussing that particular case. Go figure.

Perhaps instead of constantly seeking out new ways to make voting difficult so that people of color can’t vote for the “wrong” politicians, Republicans should turn back toward the limited government rhetoric they used to at least pretend to believe. But then, they never really did believe it, did they?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Amnesty International’s mission is “to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.” Unsurprisingly, the organization’s latest report collects “first-hand testimony of survivors, court documents, medical records and various other forms of evidence relating to 74 cases of torture” in Thailand and urges that country’s legislature and military government to follow through on their claimed commitments to bring an end to the practice.

After Amnesty staff flew into Bangkok for the report’s official release, the regime threatened them with arrest for “visa violations” if the ceremony took place. Apparently the junta, which has ruled the country since a 2014 coup, is unfamiliar with the “Streisand Effect.” Their threats ensured that Amnesty’s report received more global attention on the morning of its release than it would likely otherwise have received altogether.

Among those who should take notice are American taxpayers, who fork over billions of dollars in direct and indirect military aid to the junta forces — weapons, cash, the positive cash flow associated with large US-sponsored military exercises like Cobra Gold, and the putative shade of a US “security umbrella.”

American law is clear on the subject of such aid. Per 22 US Code § 2378d, (“Limitation on assistance to security forces,” better known as the Leahy Law), “No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter or the Arms Export Control Act … to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”

Surely 74 cases of torture constitute such a gross violation — as does threatening human rights activists with arrest for talking about those cases of torture. Yet US military aid has continued to flow to the junta, albeit at a reduced rate for a short time.

As a libertarian, I oppose all US foreign aid for military purposes or any others. The only way the US government can give away that money is to first steal it from Americans (or borrow at interest on the promise to steal it later). Individuals who want to support the Thai junta should write those checks themselves instead of mugging the rest of us.

But failing that, it seems to me that the US government can AT LEAST stop throwing cash at torturers. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

In 1962, US Army Corps of Engineers personnel pumped 165 million gallons of waste fluid into rock 12,000 feet below the surface of the earth at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal and noticed that the pumping was accompanied by a number of small earthquakes. Six years later, the US Geological Survey monitored seismic activity as the Corps pumped some of that water back out, observing a noticeable increase in seismic activity after the pumping.

Some people — namely, public relations flacks and lobbyists for the petroleum and natural gas industries, and their political allies — would have you believe that’s a disputable, even controversial, claim. It isn’t. It’s something we’ve known for half a century.

Question: What’s the difference between a drunk driver who totals your car with his reckless, intoxicated driving, and an oil company that damages your house’s foundation with its reckless, earthquake-inducing fracking?

Answer: The oil company can afford to buy off politicians and regulators to let it injure you without legal consequence or liability, and to run slick public relations campaigns aimed at convincing you to not believe your own lying eyes. The drunk driver counts himself lucky if he has enough cash on hand to buy the next six-pack.

Some self-styled advocates of “capitalism” and “free markets” have prostituted themselves out to the fracking industry, attempting to justify that kind of privilege and favoritism in the name of cheap energy and economic growth, all the while decrying “crony capitalism” as it relates to industries which haven’t written generous checks to fund what the so-called think tanks euphemistically refer to as “research.”

There’s a difference between a free market and a free-for-all. In a free market, you have to pay for what you take. That includes restitution for damages caused by your reckless, negligent, or even criminally intentional, activities.

Fracking causes earthquakes. Earthquakes damage stuff. It’s time for frackers to start picking up the check for that damage or to knock off the fracking. They don’t have to like it. That’s how it needs to be whether they like it or not.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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